The present invention relates to a system of giving protection against impermissible use of a software such as a program recorded on a recording medium.
Generally known is a recording medium having ROM (an area which is not allowed to be rewritten by the user) areas and RAM (an area which is allowed to change its data by the user) areas, software being prestored in each ROM area in production of the recording medium. Recently, attempts for configuring the recording medium are being made for software protection purposes. One approach involves a hardware-type protection system whereby use of the software is allowed only under the condition that a specific device is coupled to a recording/reproduction apparatus to be used for the recording medium. However, this hardware-type protection system becomes costly and is not useful in practice because of requiring the specific device.